Arpeggios can be a weak area for a lot of guitar students, and this is lousy because the application of an arpeggio within a solo sounds very cool and that means if you're not using them, you're missing out...

On this weeks "Guitar Blog Insider" we're going to make a study of two easy to play arpeggios that you can learn right now. Once you learn these, you'll find that they will most certainly change your guitar playing for the better. If you're like a lot of guitar players, you probably haven't actually spent very much study time learning arpeggios. Even worse, many of you may not even know what an arpeggio is! That's okay, because we're going to help you fix that.

In this lesson, we're going to learn two very common arpeggio shapes that you'll be able to put into use right away. So, if there's an absence of arpeggios in your playing, I'm going to help you out with two shapes that'll put an end to that forever. Let's get started...Watch the Video:

Arpeggios are essentially the notes of a chord, so if you take any chord pattern and organize the notes from the region of the neck that's associated to a chord pattern, then you'll have access to an arpeggio pattern that fits around that chord shape. Another way of looking at it is that an arpeggio is every second note of a scale.

If you take a scale like "A Minor," the notes of "A, C, E," would be your basic triad arpeggio, and then if you added on the note of "G" you'd have (what's called) a 7th-chord arpeggio.Let's get started with our first pattern, "The 5th string Major Triad" Here's how it looks on the neck...MAJOR TRIAD ARPEGGIO:

Alright, now that you have your major arpeggio pattern organized on the neck, let's check out the equivalent Minor pattern based upon the same region of notes...If you're familiar with basic chord quality theory, you'll already know that major chords convert to minor chords by way of lowering the third chord tone. In the case of a "C Arpeggio," the third is an "E" note, (when the chord is major), so if we wanted, "C Minor" arpeggio, all we have to do is lower the "E" down to an "Eb."

Based on this lowered third idea, let's take our pattern from the major quality, (we'll lower the 3rd), and run through the new shape for the "Minor" arpeggio... MINOR TRIAD ARPEGGIO:

So, there ya go, now you have two arpeggio patterns that are not only incredibly popular (and easy to play), but they're also easy to memorize and that means you'll be able to get them into your guitar playing as quickly as possible to be able to start making music with them. As always, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on all of this in the comment section, thanks for your time, and we'll catch up again next week on my other channel, for another episode of the, "Guitar Blog Insider."